Friday 22 August 2014 05.02 EDT
First published on Friday 22 August 2014 05.02 EDT

India has blocked the release of a film about the assassination of Indira Gandhi, saying it glorifies her killers and could trigger violent protests.

India's film classification board said on Friday the film glorified the two Sikh bodyguards who killed the then prime minister to avenge her suppression of an insurgency that culminated in an army assault on the Golden Temple, Sikhism's holiest shrine.

The film Kaum De Heere, or Diamonds of the Community, was scheduled to be released across northern India on Friday.

The classification board chief, Leela Samson, said panel members saw the film and decided it could not be released as it posed a threat to public order.

"The film is double trouble. It glorifies Indira Gandhi's assassins who took the law into their own hands and it glorifies the hanging of the two men."

The film deals with the insurgency that gripped the northern Indian state of Punjab through the late 1970s and early 1980s when Sikh militants demanded a separate Sikh nation.

In June 1984, Gandhi ordered the Indian army to flush out hundreds of heavily armed Sikh separatists barricaded inside the Golden Temple in Amritsar. The attack outraged Sikhs and led to a deadly breakdown in communal relations.

Later that year, Gandhi was killed by her bodyguards, and the country was swept by a wave of rioting which resulted in the deaths of more than 2,000 Sikhs.

Officials said the recent arrest of India's chief film censor on accusations that he solicited bribes to speed the clearance of films drew attention to the clearance given to Kaum De Heere.

The chief executive of the classification board, Rakesh Kumar, was arrested on Tuesday after a sting operation in which two of his associates sought 70,000 rupees (£700) on his behalf to speed up the censor's clearance for a film.

During questioning, Kumar revealed that he had accepted a bribe of 100,000 rupees from the makers of Kaum De Heere to approve its censor certification.

The film's producer Pardeep Bansal and its director Ravinder Ravi have denied the charges.

Leaders of India's ruling Bharatiya Janata party and the main opposition Congress party have called for the film to be banned, saying it would offend people's religious and community feelings.